


at the gateway barricade of science

by DatAsymptote



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Gen, Modern Era, cosette is studying aeronautic engineering and eponine does environmental science, marius doesn't know physics, onesided cosette/eponine, pre-med shenanigans, there's aquariums and penguins and rachel carson's silent spring, there's other ships in the background
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:54:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25337197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DatAsymptote/pseuds/DatAsymptote
Summary: Combeferre has a year-long family pass to the Aquarium. Les Amis all call it a strange mediator.
Relationships: Combeferre/Éponine Thénardier, Cosette Fauchelevent & Éponine Thénardier
Kudos: 12





	at the gateway barricade of science

Combeferre has a year-long family pass to the Aquarium.

It was at the start of the semester, during icebreakers (it was the first meeting, Marius had just joined them and Feuilly insisted, from his time as a freshmen orientation guide, that icebreakers did work -- only afterwards did the Amis find out that the icebreakers that his freshmen did were repetitive rounds of Mafia), where Combeferre dropped the fact during a round of two truths, one lie.

On any good day, the aquarium's entrance fee is $40.

On Thursday evenings, it's half-off, at $20.

With Combeferre by your side, with four or less people in your party and that family pass in his hand, it's free, any day of that year.

In a way, that pass is a strange mediator.

When he took Enjolras and Grantaire along with him, he had tagged in front of them, essentially leaving them to their own devices. Once, during that visit, he turned around to find them gone, and only to find them again in front of the nurse sharks, holding hands.

“Can you imagine how the aquarium would be a house of the medieval muse?” One week, Jehan joined Combeferre on the common excursion. Jehan had been burying himself away in the rare books section of the library, pouring over monastic manuscripts for a class. Every sentence from his mouth was on knights fighting snails or on perilously armed bunnies. “I wish I could show a monk an anglerfish.”

Between the jellyfish exhibit and the Amazonian fish, Joly and Combeferre would study for the MCAT. Somehow textbooks are more pleasant when illuminated in blue. They said that this was the wavelength that people associated with the day. They brought their flashcards with them and tested each other on obscure facts. On a sticky note, Combeferre doodled a picture of Joly - cane and all -, and stuck it right next to the paragraph of somatic symptom disorders.

~*~

Combeferre was late through the door for the weekly meeting at Cafe Musain. “Sorry,” he apologised, finding his way to the group’s table, his jacket only half-off his body. “Shadowing.”

Four in the afternoon was a sensible time for coffee as any, and despite the two espressos he already had that day, he was already heading back towards the front counter for a latte. The only spare seat at the table was by Eponine, so he threw his jacket onto it.

Once he ended back, coffee in hand, his head was still filled with thoughts of that shadowing. “It was a lung surgery this time… incredible.” He didn’t have the words. Joly, his companion in pre-med shenanigans, was half-way across the room, sharing a chair with Boussuet. Combeferre could scarcely comprehend the words that Enjolras was saying, his mind too focused on the tissue of the lung, how delicate, like the beating wings of a moth.

To catch Enjolras’ face, Combeferre had to crane his head past Eponine. She was listening - he knew because her mouth was downturned in that thoughtful way, but her head wasn’t angled to the same source. 

Her eyes were soft, and they fell on Cosette.

~*~

The next day, he found her at the library front desk. It was a quiet job, one that meant that she always had her books out in front of her, and that Combeferre, if he ever needed conversation, never had to strain to find a gap.

“I don’t think I’ll ever regret bringing Cosette to the meetings,” she admitted to him. In front of her, her journals and highlighters were a messy spread. Combeferre took a glance down - equations that went over his head, something on energy efficiency of solar power. 

She’d met Cosette in Freshman Year, some shared entry-level calculus class, Eponine explained. Combeferre had heard the story many times before, had heard of how Eponine skipped Les Amis meetings ever-so-infrequently, to meet up with some blonde aeronautical engineering student to go over due homeworks. 

Eponine was not one to confess easily, but the subtext was there. Combeferre saw how the floral sundresses that Cosette wore reflected themselves in Eponine’s tiled floral phone backgrounds, how aeronautics snuck themselves into Eponine’s lexicon. 

“But also,” she added, “I can’t blame Courfeyrac for wanting to bring Marius to meetings.”

“He’s pre-law, isn’t he? With the freckles?”

“Also incapable of talking physics! But yes, that’s him.”

There was something so nonchalant in her voice, that Combeferre couldn’t help but laugh. The mental image of Courfeyrac’s strange friend in front of a blackboard with equations sprawled upon it, sounding out the word ‘wavefunction’, was impossible.

“Well, the important thing is, are you upset?”

She shrugged, which was enough of an answer.

“Come with me, then. To the aquarium. It might cheer you up.” It was so Combeferre of him, with his ‘might’s, scientific uncertainty embedded in all that he did. “Besides, it’s a place where you can talk physics.”

~*~

A strange mediator. 

Eponine was carrying a copy of Silent Spring with her, so Combeferre read over her shoulder on the bus ride there. Half an hour went by quickly to the words of Rachel Carson. They talked throughout the trip, on environmental activism and how the MCAT studying was going and yesterday did-you-see Feuilly throwing his crowd of freshman an outdoors picnic. 

Out of all Les Amis, Eponine was the only one from the city that they lived in. Her younger brother, Gavroche, was never less than a bike ride away - at a child’s hostel where he could live and go to middle school and even join Les Amis at the cafe, provided that it wasn’t too late for him. 

(“If it weren’t for you guys, I don’t think he’d know that this school even exists,” she had said once, back when the group went to post up signs for their preferred primary candidate. Gavroche had joined them, skipping in front. “So detached from the rest of the city.”

Combeferre had been there that day with her, along with Grantaire, and he believed her words entirely.)

“As I’ve said before, that’s why I went into Environmental Sciences. I’ve seen the disproportionate effects of acid rain on communities.”

And Combeferre talked about medicine. Joly had been too busy to hear him ramble about the lung surgery he shadowed, so Eponine leant him her ears. “Like the wings of a moth,” he tried to mimic the motion they made in the chest cavity with his hands. “Is this too gory? I can stop.”

It would have been gory, perhaps, had it not been Combeferre. Behind his eyes was nothing but softness, and his descriptions were nothing but kind, as if he sewed up wounds with the sutures of words alone.

~*~

All the other Amis said that the aquarium was a strange mediator, but they were mis-assigning their sources.

It is not the aquarium.

It is Combeferre. Combeferre who knew the building like an in-built map, Combeferre who knew his friends well enough to pinpoint exactly what section of the aquarium that they'd adore. Call the aquarium mere medication, for the art of medicine is compassion and understanding upon its science.

What would Eponine have liked? Combeferre hadn't worked that out yet. Still, not everyone had to be a scientific conundrum after all, not everyone should be reduced to some formula. She was stern and withdrawn with a dry wit and Combeferre was beginning to realise, beyond those times that he dropped by the library for small talk and to give book recommendations, maybe he didn’t know her enough.

The plurality of their time spent at the aquarium was at the sea butterfly exhibition.

From the angle that he stood at, he could see Eponine's smile reflected in the glass, an admiring look of awe in her eyes, as she watched the sea snails blob about.

~*~

“The last aquarium I went to had penguins,” Eponine’s smile was still etched on her face as they left the building, three hours later. “I feel like you’d have loved it.”

“There’s none here,” Combeferre would know, he’s paced this route a dozen and more times, with other friends before by his side. The Zoo did, though, a fact known through advertisements.

(On the bus back, he looked up its entrance fee.)


End file.
